No, Google doesn’t intend to become a national Internet Service Provider, despite its new plan to build a number of optical networks to serve homes and businesses at up to one gigabit-per-second. The real plan is half Xerox PARC and half Tom Sawyer.

When the Computer Science Lab at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center was organized by Bob Taylor in the early 1970s to revolutionize computer, network, and printing technology, there was a conscious decision to live 10 years in the future. The CSL would build devices that could be expected to make economic sense in 1980, not 1970. This was a huge leap, because it meant the amount of memory in each […]